I had been hearing about the Yezidi people who live in villages near Dohuk. Followers of an ancient religion, whose proponents claim it is the oldest in the world, there are thought to be about a half million Yezidis, living mostly in the area of Mosul, with smaller bands in forgotten villages scattered across northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and other lands. Saddam had labeled the Yezidis “Devil Worshippers,” a claim I’d heard other Iraqis make, but no source offered substantiation. I wanted to know more.

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Just to be clear, the killings - which were indeed horrible - were in response to the Yezidi stoning of a woman who'd fallen in love with a Muslim and converted. Her family dragged her back to the village and she was stoned to death. The murders of the workers on the bus seem to have been in retaliation.

The whole situation sucks, but was not directly about simply being thought of as devil worshippers.

Two wrongs thereby making a right? Kill 23 for one? There has to be some ideological motive here as well, I think, something on the order of, "Here is an excuse to kill infidels."

Two wrongs making a right and 23-for-the-crimes-of-1 are entirely typical of that culture. The ideology you're looking for isn't specifically Muslim, but generically Middle Eastern: lex talonis and centuries-long blood feuds, two of that region's more unfortunate cultural innovations.

Fundamentally it's an ideology that sees people not as individuals responsible for their own actions, but as representatives of their clan or creed. Disputes are not seen as a matter of what he did to him, but of what they did to us, for which all or any of them can be righteously punished. And of course, while any of them are left standing - even ones who were not even peripherally involved - then the demands of 'honour' have not been satisfied, so it can escalate indefinitely.

I think religion here plays much the same role as it does in Ireland - mainly a way of marking the teams. Certainly various sub-groups of Muslims - sects or even individual families - are just as happy to fight each other as they are to fight devil-worshiping infidels. But, given that Islam grew up in such a cultural environment, this kind of attitude obviously informs kill-the-infidel ideology as well.

Chas, give me a break and read what I actually wrote before going off half cocked. I said the killings were horrible and meant it. They were.

I was simply trying to correct your statement that they were killed only for reasons of being Yezidis. The roots of the conflict are indeed old, the Yezidis are indeed an oppressed minority, *and* in this case there was the added element of retribution for the stoning of the Yezidi woman who had converted to Islam. As this piece of the story had not made some of the original news (on NPR, for example), I thought that this might expand your knowledge of the situation.

I am not defending the killers on either side and would thank you not to imply that I am.

by "killed only for reasons of being Yezidis" I should have said "for being thought of as devil worshippers" which was the point of my original posting.

And I would point you to my blog of two days ago in which I specifically pray for the Yezidis killed in Iraq, except you'd probably just accuse me of 'going all Reclaiming on you' because the blog happens to be about love.

Here it is, for what it is worth, which is not much in the scheme of thingshttp://yezida.livejournal.com/120814.html

When I was in the Kurdish area of Turkey last year (very much in the country) our very urbane Ankara- based Kurdish guide was fond of both Americans and Turks. But he said Arabs were "animals" -- this when a friend mistakenly asssumed his cousin was married to one ("Arabs are animals! Are you saying my cousin would marry an ANIMAL??" And he attributed all the troubles in the world-- his words-- to "Greeks, Armenians, and Jews".

To be fair, whenever his relatives started screaming at each other, he would look at us and say "The Kurdish problem will not be solved yet..."

Also, the Kurds played an often unacknowledged role in the Armenian massacres. Who do you think lives in at least the southern part of their homeland?

Aquari, why do I get the feeling that at some level you want to apologize for the killers by saying, "It's just their culture"?

Exactly the contrary: I would call their culture deeply dysfunctional, perhaps fatally so. Certainly fatal for the people in question. Civilization is meant to be a ceasefire in the 'war of all against all', not an incitement to it. And civilizations can and do collapse from becoming invested in self-destructive behaviours.

No, what I was trying to achieve was a distinction between religion driving culture, and culture driving religion. In your response to Thorn you were saying that 'there has to be some ideological motive for this', and made clear you thought the ideology in question was religious. I was arguing the reverse, that it can be attributed to secular cultural ideals of blood-feud and revenge, with religion being a post-hoc justification at best. I further argued that religious feuds in general are often motivated by secular animosities of culture, ethnicity and/or class, and gave North Ireland as an example. I hope my line of thought is clearer now, whether you agree with it or not.